Page 331 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

CHAPTER 14

Potpourri

The first 90 percent of the task takes 90 percent of the
time, and the last 10 percent of the task takes the other
90 percent of the time.
—The Ninety:Ten Rule

The toughest part of writing this book was not finding things to write about, but rather
deciding what we would not be able to write about. Now that we’ve covered the basics,
you are ready to be told the truth: we have not taught you anywhere near all that there
is to know about Asterisk.
Now please understand, this is not because we didn’t want to give you our very best;
it’s merely because Asterisk is, well, limitless (or so we believe).
In this chapter, we want to give you a taste of some of the wonders Asterisk holds in
store for you. Nearly every section in this chapter could become a book in itself (and
they will become books, if Asterisk succeeds in the way we think it is going to).

Festival

Festival is a popular open source text-to-speech engine. The basic premise of using
Festival with Asterisk is that your dialplan can pass a body of text to Festival, which
will then “speak” the text to the caller. Probably the most obvious use for Festival would
be to have it read your email to you when you are on the road. *

* Probably the coolest use of Festival is in Simon Ditner’s ZoIP, a port of the famous Zork game to a fully
speech-enabled engine running on Asterisk (ZoIP also uses Sphinx, which we will not be covering in this
book). We’re going to have to come up with a new kind of name for this sort of thing. It’s not a video game,
since there is no screen, so do we need to call these audio games? Regardless, check it out at http://
www.zoip.org.

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